‘We aspire to give diverse languages a new lease of life’

A. Oxford University Press has had a long presence in India, for over 100 years and counting. In such an extensive span of its existence, its major focus has been on publishing quality knowledge resources for a wide group of readers, but only in English. However with changing times, our readers have also changed drastically. The demand for quality resources in languages other than English is steadily growing as Indian languages are empowered economically and socio-politically. These languages are the new engines of growth and development as predicted by many within our public sphere. In this atmosphere of change and new awakening in diverse languages, OUP decided to uphold its university’s mission of providing quality educational, research, and knowledge resources to an audience that it did not address earlier. We realised that by not addressing such a significant section of the population we are expanding existing fissures between the world of languages and knowledge. To fill this gap, we embarked upon our initiative of publishing in Indian languages. We are beginning this programme by making available translations of some of our classic titles by authors such as RomilaThapar, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Mushirul Hasan, Irfan Habib, Veena Das, to name a few, in Hindi and Bengali by January 2018. This set of books will be accompanied by new books in these languages in both print and digital format. We also plan to expand to other Indian languages as the programme takes off.

Q. How do you think this initiative will impact your readership?

A. Our readers have mostly been students, scholars, researchers, civil society activists, social scientists and readers interested to understand various issues in-depth. In the Indian context, these also include students, researchers, readers who are not so well equipped in English but do use our volumes frequently as reference and for pedagogic purposes. This section of the population hesitantly refers to these volumes or misses out from referring to them altogether due to the language gap. There also does not exist quality translations of our volumes in Indian languages such that readers in different Indian languages could be catered to. By publishing our own titles and also some from other publishers in translation, we would like to ensure that this lack of availability of resources is no longer felt by this group of readers.

Apart from translations, we also plan to publish new titles in Indian languages.

Q. Given that there are many translated works already available in Hindi and Bangla, why did you decide to start OUP’s translation division with titles in these two languages? Are you planning to branch out to other Indian languages in the future?

A. Translated works in Hindi and Bengali may be abundantly available but they are limited in terms of variety in content. Our product offering will vary from other publishers in terms of the quality of our translated material, its form (digital and print), and the long list of classic titles we plan to publish over the years. Our pool of global publication is formidable and we realised that it was the best resource we owned to begin the programme in the first phase.

Yes, we do have plans to branch out to other Indian languages in the next phase of the programme. These will include Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu etc., depending of course upon our resources and how well the programme takes off.

“ Most of our titles are from the baskets of social sciences, humanities, arts, literature, since our publishing heritage in India has been such. Having said this, we are not closed to experimenting with new disciplines if they pique the interests of our readers. We are also interested in translating some of the best non-fiction titles that are being written in the country today.”

Q. Please list some of the prominent OUP titles that are already available in Hindi and Bangla.

A.Our Hindi and Bengali titles have not yet hit the market. We plan to launch with a basket of around 10-12 books in January 2018. Some titles from this basket include, Time as a Metaphor of History by RomilaThapar, India’s Foreign Policy by Sumit Ganguly, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India by Ramachandra Guha and MadhavGadgil in Hindi, and Talking Back:The Idea of Civilization in the Indian Nationalist Discourse by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Roads to Freedom: Prisoners in Colonial India by Mushirul Hasan, Founding an Empire on India’s North-Eastern Frontier, 1790–1840:Climate, Commerce, Polity by Gunnel Cederlöfin Bengali.

Q.Are you looking to translate mainly books on social sciences, or even specialised books such as in subjects like science, technology and management? What about fiction and poetry?

A. Most of our titles are from the baskets of social sciences, humanities, arts, literature, since our publishing heritage in India has been such. Having said this, we are not closed to experimenting with new disciplines if they pique the interests of our readers. We are also interested in translating some of the best non-fiction titles that are being written in the country today. Titles that deal with a definitive issue in a narrative style are generating wide interest, and we plan to make such narratives easily accessible to Indian language readers. We have no plans of publishing fiction and poetry.

Q. There has always been a shortage of skilled translators in India. How do you plan to deal with this problem and ensure that the content you produce is up to scratch?

A. To ensure that our translations do not suffer from lack of quality, we are rigorously reviewing our scripts by external reviewers. These reviewers function like our reviewers in English language books. They comment and suggest improvements and developments that the translator can work upon. We are thus working with multiple sets of people to ensure that the translations are lucid, readable, and are published as new works in themselves. We hope that our efforts in ensuring this will pay off once the books start coming in and the programme grows and develops in experience.

We also hope that as we establish this translation programme, we are able to encourage close associations with groups of individual experts, institutions, and organisation to develop a network of people enriched in the art of translation, such that our native languages are not lost to oblivion. We aspire to give diverse languages a new lease of life in the long term.

Q. Has the OUP been involved in similar projects internationally? Or is this programme, of bringing out books in languages other than English, the first of its kind for the publishing house?

A. We have a vibrant programme called the “Oxford Global Languages”, which aims to build lexical resources for 100 of the world’s languages and make them available online. Large quantities of quality lexical information for a wide range of languages are now available in a single, linked repository for use by speakers, learners, and developers.

We hope that our Indian languages programme will feed into this initiative and that we become a truly diverse and global press.